that our free market enterprise system is based IN PART upon the financial ignorance and stupidity of individuals and/or groups...

80% of the people, give or take, have no education beyond high school even though many of these people have common sense which I would guess would be another 80/20 split which seems to be a general rule of thumb.

When in college, I was told in a marketing class to advertise and market as though most of the people had an 8th grade education.

While my comments are obviously a personal opinion, one can easily see where this is going, and that is, persuade or convince the general masses to spend their money on your product or service, whether they need it or not, and regardless of liabilities already in place.

IBM had a more sophisticated approach by convincing their junior executives to stay in debt as part of their position which kept them from easily leaving the company.

Built in obsolescence was used in manufacturing to build products that would need to be replaced in 3-5 years, thereby generating an on-going and constant stream of income.

We, the financially ignorant consumer, acted like boiling frogs in the process, not questioning the process at all.

Today, we sell student loans to people who cannot afford them to get education that they cannot retain and therefore not use. We play on the ignorance of people by convincing them to go after quick cash and use their bank credit to pay for it. We convince people who cannot afford it to buy tickets to sports events, concerts, or theme parks, knowing that they do not have the financial resources to pay off that credit during the entire next year.

We become wealthy by taking advantage of the financial ignorance of the poor and then we deposit that money in off shore accounts that cannot be taxed by the Federal Govt. to collect money to help the poor.

And, the really sad part about all of this, is that no one CARES... and, if they do... it is not enough to do anything about it... so, it just continues...

But, if we did not do this, our country would not be the greatest financial country in the world now.

The practice of medicine is based upon ignorance and stupidity. Physicians stay in business by taking advantage of the fact that the majority of people are not trained physicians. Therefore, they are exploiting all non-physicians by using their skills as physicians in order to act as physicians.

ALL SKILLED WORK is ultimately "based upon ignorance and stupidity", because the premium any sane society places upon skilled work is ultimately based upon the relative "ignorance and stupidity" of the population at large in comparison to the skilled individual when considering only that specific skilled labor. There have been some "workers' paradise" attempts to not place any premium upon the earnings of the highly-skilled. These have always failed, always, 100% of the time, without exception. After all, if there is no premium to be gained by exercising the skill, why bother to learn it in the first place? Even Plato ended up admitting that his Republic was really nothing but so much fart gas.

Jul 16 2013:
Alex: the evolution you are describing seems to be unsustainable. The real reason , I believe, is not that the system depends on "stupidity" , but rather that those at the other end of the IQ spectrum have discovered not only that they can game the system, but that they can get away with it, because of our confused moral code. They are in the process of making our "country" irrelevant, while they are busily promoting Globalization. They may possibly get away with it for awhile, but the process eventually either runs out of consumerswith money, or implodes in violence, like the French Revolution. You really should give some thought to the real meaning of "our free market system" as opposed to the hype. And while you are at it, if , as appears to be the case, the Industrial Revolution is going to end with AI, robots, and practically no "Labor" , except for CEOs, of course, where is all this wealth going to end up , and what would be the justification for it? It would seem that the Free Market System is unsustainable, for a number of reasons.

Jul 18 2013:
This is a very interesting observation... one would think at first blush that you are logically correct, but since we have been doing this, in some form or another, for years, it has been sustainable so far, albeit not our brand of a free market but TRADE in general.

There has been several SciFi books and movies that have predicted that robots will do all the manual labor and fight all the wars so that MANKIND can pursue a more intellectual direction, but what about the other 80% who do not have the mental equipment for that?

We will always need crops picked and bathrooms cleaned and other labor intensive jobs that are not fit for robots to do...

However, AI is another story altogether and quite possible several years off... it's first use will be in the military of course and maybe into space, but not right away for the rest of us.

Jul 18 2013:
What about the 80% who do not have the mental equipment to take proper advantage of a labor-free society? Who do you think watches Jerry Springer, Teen Mom, Survivor, Real World, etc.? These people will derive their existential meaning by either appearing on these shows or watching them, buying the products advertised, thereon.

Orwell is what we are taught to fear, this is to distract us from the reality that is Huxley.

Jul 12 2013:
We have a free market within certain restrictions, but we are greedy. If I have a low profit margin I have to sell a lot of units let's say, but it the profit margin is high, I don't have to sell many at all. If 80% of the people are unaware of the game that is being played upon them, then does that mean we should inform them or take advantage of them? It is not my fault that you are ignorant.

Jul 12 2013:
P T Barnum of the circus said that or something very close and it is basically true. Is a person insecure or outfitted with business savvy to think like this. I mean do we not want to make the most amount of money for the least amount of work?

Society has a pecking order and at each level the below is being screwed, so much so that it is commonplace.